Hello. I thought I would start documenting our restoration bit by bit on our newly purchased 1972 Airstream Tradewind 25'. I've been taking lots of photos to keep this thread updated as we work. We have plans to go full-time starting Oct., so this should all be very exciting how it all turns out. We are on a very limited $$ budget and time frame and neither of us have any related experience. It should be interesting where we cut corners, where we mess up, and what we actualy end up doing right. Me, (Kelly) and my boyfriend Bill (aka "Airspleen") made our purchase of our new rig "Ferlin" back on July 8th and it's been sitting in an outdoor boatyard up on Cape Cod up until this past weekend. We bought the airstream first then had the challenge of buyng the right TV. After searching for a few weeks we got up to the Cape to rescue out our new home and thankfuly it towed back to Bill's folks house seamlessly. Starting Sept. we will be with our airstream and have more updates on the progress of the renovation. This is our progress after having spending only 3 days with it. Did I mention we have plans bigger than what we are capible of doing!! ahahahah. Oh the fun begins....

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This is before we started ripping the thing apart. This is before we realized it smelled musty, had mouse poopy all over the place and had a layout that just won't work for us as to full-time with. This is me, the happy as a bumble bee new owner, coming to terms with the fact that I just made a life long dream a total reality. Yay!

This is the interior from the entrance looking back to the rear bath. It's got two twins along the side. This definitley will not work for me and Bill since neither of us care to sleep like the Flinstones. This is our largest obstacle.

John Bunnay Ramsey and Lois the Pie Queen, our beloved furry friends that are coming along for the ride. Of course they are taken into consideration on all modifications..

First thing we did was tear out the berber capet and the padding. What we discoverd is that the last people who had it, didn't bother carpeting underneath any of the furniture, and we did indeed find a few spots on the wood floor which appear to be rotting. These spots are located directly under the two overhead skylight eveybrow windows that I've now learned are total problem areas of this vintage with leakage.. oh great...(we are planning on getting armstrong commercial square tiles or linolium not sure what exactly just yet in place of the carpet)

Some of these areas are wet due to the cracked water heater we discoverd. Water was going all over the place when we tried connecting to city water. We are on the mark looking for a replacement..

The next thing we did was take out the guacho and one of the twin beds. The other one is coming out as soon as we know what's going inplace of it.

also we were told that our propane tanks are from 1972 and are unusable. is this true?

Of course we still have much more to check out on it, I don't think the furnace works, or the water pump, some of the runner lights, and some of the interior lights didn't work. Some did however. We were told to silicone all the creases, and those eyebrow windows also have a UV coating that are peeling off and look pretty ugly. Also we discovered a hole and ripped seam on the underbelly

Stay tunned..

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__________________"We are facing a movement of population beside which even the Crusades will seem like Sunday school picnics."www.readysteadytow.blogspot.com

Don't discard your propane tanks! They can be refurbished and fit with new valves for less money than buying new ones. Just go to your local LPG supplier andthey should be able to advise where you can have this done.

I have a '72 Overlander that we have been bringing new life to, and we just got our old tanks tested and certified. No problems at all. And they will polish up very well to match the outside skin when we polish her up.

To help your budget you can sell original items that you are not planning on using. That unit looks to be very original and in decent shape, depending on budget I would replace the old Univolt and update the 12v fuse panel. Get your fridge working if possible, that is a big ticket item to replace, water pump and hot water heater are cheaper items. If you still have the original AC, see if you can get it going, that is a very servicable unit and parts can still be cross refrenced for it. IMHO the furnace is secondary, worse case use electric plug in heaters they are cheap and very effective.
Good luck on your project.

It was such a cool surprise to see that when i opened up the fridge after a few ays of it plugged into the house we had ice in our freezer and the fridge was cold! The a/c was replaced i believe in 2001 and we have a recepit that they paid 1500.00 for it. glad that wasn't us. we posted to sell the original parts but nobody has jumped yet. Yeah it was all original and in pretty good shape. I'm usualy a stickler for keeping things original, but in this case we've decided to modernize it. it's a bit dark for us. Does anybody know what type of paint we can use on the vinyl walls? or on the wood pannelng? I'd like to keep hints of it here and there but not all of it.
-Kelly

__________________"We are facing a movement of population beside which even the Crusades will seem like Sunday school picnics."www.readysteadytow.blogspot.com

Good morning. Regarding your question about paint; we recently painted the inside of our '72 Overlander after gutting it, and it came out great! On our thread it has all the info about the paint we used etc; http://www.airforums.com/forum...der-21030.html